Preview of Steve Aoki’s New Album on Rollingstone.com

Steve Aoki Recruits will.i.am, Rivers Cuomo, Travis Barker for Album

By STEVE BALTIN
SEPTEMBER 12, 2011 2:25 PM ET

For his new album Wonderland (out around Christmas), Steve Aoki enlisted the help of a few of his close friends – including will.i.am, Travis Barker, LMFAO and Rivers Cuomo, who came out to perform their new song “Earthquakey People” at Aoki’s IDentity Festival show at the Hollywood Palladium last Sunday.

“Rivers is a friend and I wrote the record specifically for him in mind,” Aoki says of the collaboration, which will be released as a single in October.

Aoki has worked with several of the artists previously, including will.i.am and Barker. The will.i.am track, “Danger,” is a followup of sorts to their previous collaboration, “I’m In The House.” “He’s like the king of pop as far as producing, he’s amazing,” says Aoki. “For example, ‘I’m In The House’ was just a straight dance record and he turned it into a pop song by creating repetition, harmony and great vocals. For this one I gave him a pretty harder edged record, but he made it friendlier for the radio. I love working with Will.”

Like most of his DJ peers, Aoki drops singles regularly and is able to tour for months at a time on his club hits, but releasing this album was important to him. “I want an album out, and the way I’m pushing this album is it’s almost like a singles compilation of my records that I’ve just written,” he says.